Philippe Claudel's Brodeck As a Parody of the Fable, Or The

Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck as a Parody of the Fable, or the Holocaust Universalized Helena Duffy Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway, Egham, TW20 0EX, United Kingdom, [email protected] Helena Duffy is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow, working at Royal Holloway, University of London. Affiliated to the Holocaust Research Institute, she is preparing the monograph Inventing the Infra-Novel: The Ethics of Holocaust Representations in French Postmodern Fiction. Prior to her present engagement, Duffy taught French language and literature at universities in the UK, Australia, France and Poland. Since completing her PhD, she has published widely on various aspects of contemporary French culture, such as non- native authors, Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes and French cinema. Her monograph World War II in Andreï Makine’s Historiographic Metafiction: No One Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Forgotten will be published in April 2018 by Brill. The research leading to these results has received funding from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) of the European Union’s research and innovation program Horizon 2020, under grant agreement number 654786. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis [Holocaust Studies] available on https://doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2018.1468669 Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck as a Parody of the Fable, or the Holocaust Universalized This article examines Philippe Claudel’s 2007 novel Brodeck (French title: Le Rapport de Brodeck) that allegorizes the Holocaust by parodying tropes and narrative structures characteristic to fairy tales and fables. While analyzing the author’s simultaneous inscription and subversion of the two ancient genres, I speculate about the possible reasons for his narrative choices and consider the meanings generated by his indirect representation of the Nazi genocide. Considering the widespread view of the Holocaust as sacred and unique, the article problematizes the novel’s universalization of the Jewish tragedy, which Claudel achieves by drawing on genres shunning historical and geographical specificity, and aiming to convey timeless and universal truths. Keywords: Holocaust; Philippe Claudel; fable; fairy tale; parody; animal rights “Nothing, anywhere can be compared to Auschwitz.” Elie Wiesel “[I]n their behavior towards creatures, all men [a]re Nazis.” Isaac Bashevis Singer “We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have the only decent attitude towards animals, will also assume a decent attitude towards these human animals. But it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them.” Heinrich Himmler “He knew […] that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in linen and furniture chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.” Albert Camus 2 Brodeck: A Novel about the Holocaust? In her study of third-generation Holocaust writers Ruth Franklin reinterprets Elie Wiesel’s oft-cited criticism of fictionalizations of the Jewish tragedy1 as an indication that Holocaust fiction can never be uniquely about its subject.2 This is because “[a]rt makes comparisons; it encourages empathy; it awakens the imagination.”3 Franklin then enlists Wiesel’s dictum, as well as his statement that “[a] memorial unresponsive to the future would violate the memory of the past,”4 in her endorsement of writing that opens up the Holocaust to comparisons with other manifestations of evil. Related to English-language texts, Franklin’s position can be extended to some contemporary French novels that share this tendency to universalize the Holocaust. Soazig Aaron’s Refusal (2002), Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2006), Yannick Haenel’s The Messenger (2009), Fabrice Humbert’s The Origin of Violence (2010) or indeed Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck (2007) are among these texts. What these novels also have in common is their deployment of postmodern narrative techniques and tropes, which means that, while shunning chronology and objectivity, they manifest distrust in the existence of a past that can be empirically investigated and verified, or univocally understood. Instead, these novels metafictionally foreground the inevitable subjectivity, interdiscursivity, presentism and political positioning of our representations of history. Predictably, such a narrative approach to Holocaust representation has irked those critics who consider the Jewish tragedy a sacrosanct subject that is best conveyed through testimonial writings, as did first-generation French-language authors, such as Anna Langfus, Elie Wiesel or Jorge Semprún. And, should the Holocaust be fictionalized, writers ought to, as many believe, abide by realist narrative conventions.5 This is why much of Holocaust literature has been rooted in time and place, uneasily lending itself to examination through a historical lens or to being enriched by our knowledge of contemporary events.6 It is therefore unsurprising that The Messenger or The Kindly Ones came under fire for their anachronistic and supposedly unscrupulous approach to history, or indeed for their universalization of the Holocaust, which Littell achieves by replotting the Nazi genocide as a modern version of Oresteia, while, Haenel’s circular novel inscribes it into the never-ending cycle of violence.7 Antithetically, other critics echo Hayden White’s reservations about the suitability of nineteenth-century narrative conventions in Holocaust literature and heed his correlated call for forms that, unlike realism, would be detached from the practices of the nation-state that gave rise to the Final Solution.8 For instance, Efraim Sicher believes that Holocaust literature must burst the boundaries of canonical narrative structures,9 since “[t]he incredible invites the 3 surreal, and the absurdity of mass death defies narrative conventions of life-stories, the Bildungsroman, or the epistolary form.”10 And, should these generic forms be deployed, “they could only come out ironically parodied or inverted.” 11 However suspicious of certain emplotment modes in Holocaust literature, White himself concedes that even “comic” or “pastoral” forms may prove acceptable if used in “a pointedly ironic way and in the interest of making a metacritical comment […] on versions of the facts [thus] emplotted.”12 This is precisely what Philippe Claudel undertakes in Brodeck that both inscribes and challenges canonical narrative structures and hence, as this article demonstrates, follows the paradigm of “historiographic metafiction.” Coined by Linda Hutcheon, the term points to postmodern literature’s extensive self-reflexivity and parodic character, which are accompanied by its paradoxical efforts “to root itself in that which both self-reflexivity and parody appear to short-circuit: the historical world.” 13 Complying with this definition, Brodeck unmistakably speaks of the Holocaust while styling itself on the fairy tale and fable; set in a vaguely specified time and locale, and steeped in animal and floral imagery, the novel invokes familiar examples of the two parodied genres. Yet, if such a narrative approach would be unlikely to raise ethical objections in conjunction with other historical situations, when applied to the Holocaust it could easily be judged morally unsound. Though appreciative of allegory’s potential to link “disparate faces of historical experience”14 and to be “a potent vector of intervention and critique,”15 Debarati Sanyal deems it “a risky mode of engaging history.”16 This is because “[i]ts transpositions cycle through distinctive histories and can transform a singular event such as the Nazi genocide into a hollowed-out structure of eternal recurrence,”17 reducing precise events to pure textuality, diminishing their historicity or even making them irrelevant. 18 Oddly, no such concerns have been raised by Brodeck’s spatiotemporal obliqueness and, unlike The Kindly Ones or The Messenger, which also engage characteristically postmodern parody, it has met with quasi-unanimous acclaim.19 Brodeck has become a set text in schools across France and beyond, and has been adapted as bande dessinée, whose reception has been also overwhelmingly positive.20 More specifically, Claudel’s allegorizing approach has been praised as a strategy of “transparency, detachment and silence” that prevents a “trivializ[ation of] the Holocaust” and “ensure[s] that a respectful distance/objectivity is maintained.”21 While this may well have been Claudel’s design, the fact remains that the writer’s displacement of the Holocaust from its spatiotemporal context can be a risky transformation of a historical phenomenon into a paradigm that, in Sanyal’s terms, “illustrates a universal rule, with all the historical and ethical distortions that ensue.”22 4 It is with these ethical considerations in mind that I will investigate Claudel’s refusal to embrace historical realism, which I construe as symptomatic of the influence of Anglo- American postmodern literary theory and praxis on contemporary French literature, of the growing temporal distance between the Holocaust and the moment of enunciation, and of the author’s lack of personal connection to the Jewish catastrophe. To see how Claudel negotiates the figure of allegory and other fairy-tale motifs and structures in relation to

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